


we've got each other and that's a lot

by rilla



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Ficlet, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-13
Updated: 2015-09-13
Packaged: 2018-04-20 16:17:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4794089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rilla/pseuds/rilla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Louis is the first person Zayn meets at university. He's definitely trouble. Luckily, Zayn likes trouble.</p>
            </blockquote>





	we've got each other and that's a lot

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on Tumblr so it might be a little rough around the edges. Title from Livin' On A Prayer, because I don't think there's a fresher in the whole of the UK who hasn't danced drunkenly to it at the student union.

ONE.

Louis is the first person Zayn meets at Sheffield Hallam. His mum and dad drive him there, without his sisters for once, and once they arrive his mum insists on taking him to do a food shop, and then she hangs up his clothes for him and puts his new sheets on his new bed, which is fractionally wider than his single at home. She lines up his books and DVDs on his shelves for him and then when his dad gently encourages her to leave, she cries, although she tries not to let him see. Zayn cries after that too, just a bit, after he’s watched their car drive off and he’s in his room by himself and he can hear clattering in the corridor outside and there are people streaming in and out of the building and there’s so much chatter from people who sound stupidly happy. He doesn’t know how you can sound so happy when the first day of university is so lonely. He sits in his desk chair, which is weirdly uncomfortable, and looks at the calendar pinned up on his huge noticeboard and wonders if he should start counting the days until Christmas, when he can go home again. 

He’s on forty-three when there’s a knock on his door and a boy sticks his head in without waiting for Zayn to tell him he can come in. He’s got messy brown hair and the bluest eyes Zayn’s ever seen, and when he opens his mouth there’s something intensely reassuring about his Yorkshire accent. “We’re playing a cheeky little game of corridor cricket,” he informs Zayn breathlessly. “Then we’re doing predrinking and going down to the union for freshers night. You in?” 

“Corridor cricket?” Zayn asks, blinking at him blankly, and the boy just grins, wicked and bright and - oh God. Oh no. 

“No one’s broken any bones yet,” the boy says, all wistful like he wishes they had. “What’s your name?” He comes fully into the room and glances around. “I like your posters. And your duvet cover.” 

“Zayn,” Zayn says faintly as the boy flings himself onto Zayn’s bed. He’s got bare brown feet with dirty soles, but he’s keeping them carefully off the clean sheets. “My name is Zayn.” 

“Hi, Zayn,” says the boy. He’s got the sort of smile that makes Zayn think he might be trouble. As it happens, Zayn likes trouble. “I’m Louis,” the boy continues. “And it’s very, very nice to meet you.”

 

TWO.

They hook up a few times in the first few weeks, except Louis has a girlfriend at home, Hannah, who’s blonde and beautiful and who appeared in Grease with Louis at school and who’s a brilliant singer and probably going to be a model one day, which is all extremely nice for her. Zayn thinks he can ignore it, except then she comes to visit and she’s bloody lovely so he has to end it with Louis. It’s no big deal, really it isn’t. It’s just kissing sometimes when they’re drunk, lingering behind the others on the way home from the student union, Louis pushing him into a bush and then hauling him up by his collar and licking into his mouth, his breath all £1 JD shots and Coke, and mumbled laughs against Zayn’s skin later as they struggled out of their clothes together, Louis’s mouth on his chest, his hip, his cock. It’s no big deal. It’s fine. 

It’s when it starts happening sober that it starts to be a problem. Zayn goes into Louis's room to ask about something their classical drama lecturer said about Sophocles and Louis slams the door behind him triumphantly and tries to tackle him onto his bed, saying "Ha ha! Now you're all mine."

Zayn lies underneath him, stiff and frozen, and tries to force his body not to curve up against Louis’s. “The thing is, you’ve got a girlfriend,” he says to Louis’s ceiling, “and she’s really nice,” and Louis says, “So…” and Zayn says “So,” and that’s that, really. That’s it for a while.

 

THREE.

They choose a house together for second year, the five of them: Zayn and Louis and Liam and Niall and Harry, his four favourite people, his four new best friends. It’s five minutes from the bus stop into uni and it’s near a Tesco Metro and the ceilings are high and the sun is bright outside, shining on the raggy little garden. The third year showing them round shrugs and says “It gets a bit cold in the winter and the cooker’s a bit funny–” and Louis says “We’ll take it!” exultantly. Pinning the whole of his second year on people he’s only known for a few months seems a bit insane but Zayn’s okay with it. He trusts them somehow, Harry with his slow smile and tangled jokes, Liam’s gentleness and the way he makes sure none of them die at the end of a night out, Niall and his effortless sunshine and generosity. And then there’s Louis, with his restless energy and sharp tongue and fierce loyalty and love. Zayn’s caught between wishing they weren’t living together and wishing they could live together for the rest of their lives. One night he sleeps on the floor next to Louis’s bed when Louis gets too drunk and they’re all a bit scared he might choke on his sick in his sleep. He looks at Louis's still face in the silver moonlight and thinks, god, no, and reaches up to push a sweaty strand of hair off Louis’s forehead, knowing that they’re too close and it’s too much and that he wouldn’t change it for the world.

 

FOUR.

Louis stays with Hannah until halfway through second term of first year, which is the longest relationship that anyone on their corridor has managed to keep going with anyone from home. Liam broke up with Danielle at the beginning of December and Jade broke up with her boyfriend over the holidays and Harry’s started to get close-lipped and miserable every time someone mentions his older DJ sort-of boyfriend Nick to him, so Zayn thinks that’s probably over too. In the meantime, Zayn’s fine. He goes out with a nice boy he met at a LGBT society night out for a while, which is pretty good fun. He introduces him to everyone and somehow they all seem to conspire to get him wasted during a game of Ring of Fire, so Zayn ends up on his hands and knees cleaning his sick off the carpet just outside the toilets. Louis comes to join him, not smiling for once. 

“Sorry about that,” he says, after a moment, and passes Zayn some kitchen roll, and Zayn says, “It’s fine,” even though it isn’t, not really. 

Louis crouches down and sprays something that smells too chemical onto the sick stain on the floor and scrubs at it with someone’s dirty tea towel, and then he admits, “It was my idea to get him drunk.”

Zayn says, “I know. It’s okay.” It definitely isn’t okay. He can feel Louis’s eyes on him, tentative and concerned, and it’s dreadful. “You had a girlfriend,” Zayn spits out, “and now I have a boyfriend. So. There we go.”

Louis says, “Right,” softly, and gets up and walks away.

 

FIVE.

When Zayn breaks up with his boyfriend, no one is surprised, which is rude. He sort of expects Louis to get a new girlfriend, but he doesn’t. Instead he apparently makes it his mission to become Zayn’s new best mate, and he does pretty well at it. They’re the only two out of their group of friends who like to blaze on a regular basis, so they go out together behind their block on afternoons when neither of them have any lectures to get quietly high on the cold little patio there. Louis gets giggly and sweet when he’s stoned, leaning against Zayn’s shoulder and taking his hand, running his fingertips over the swallow tattooed there. He knocks on Zayn’s door late at night when they’re the only two awake, sprawls on his bed when Zayn’s at his desk, reaches up to grab Zayn’s comics off his windowsill. Zayn doesn’t have to tell him to be careful with them, because somehow he just seems to know. They talk late into the night, Zayn gravitating over to his bed to huddle with Louis there, arms pressed together. Sometimes they fall asleep together. Louis steals all his favourite t-shirts and Niall raises his eyebrows knowingly every time he sees Louis in one of them. Zayn stares at him blankly like he has no idea at all what Niall’s trying to insinuate. 

Spring turns into summer and into exam season. Apparently Louis hates revising, and refuses to do it until Zayn shouts at him and sits him down on his bed with a pile of books and gives him M&Ms for every fifteen minutes of work he does, like he’s a dog, or a particularly stupid toddler. It somehow works: Zayn and Harry come through their first year with firsts and Niall gets a 2.1 and Liam gets a 2.2 that no one mentions to him because it makes him look like he’s about to cry and Louis gets a 2.2 that he shows off relentlessly about because he managed not to fail. He rings Zayn up during the summer holidays and says “I told my mum it was all you. I think she loves you almost as much as I do! Who knew _that_ was possible?”

Zayn’s glad that no one’s there to see him blush like an idiot even as he mumbles “Yeah, yeah. All right. I'm glad you passed.”

Louis says, “You’re brilliant,” and Zayn says, “Maybe I am.” No one’s ever told him that before. Part of him would like to believe it.

 

SIX.

Zayn and Louis get the attic rooms in their new house. It feels more intimate somehow, the five of them sitting around together in their living room instead of crowding into someone's bedroom in halls. Zayn half misses the hubbub of first year but it’s nice to have some space to breathe. The first night they're in their house Louis taps on his door and sticks his head around it without waiting for Zayn to tell him to come in. He remembers being surprised by that a year ago, but a lot has changed since then. Today he just feels himself smile up at Louis from his bed, where he’s lying out with a copy of Catch 22 for his seminar in two days’ time. He has four hundred pages left; he doesn’t think he’s going to make it. Louis is leaner than he was, and darkly tanned from his lads’ holiday in Corfu. Zayn missed him over the summer. He missed him a lot. 

Louis breathes, “Hi,” and then he says with a bit of a pout, “The others are all asleep. Their lights are off anyway. Boring fuckers.” 

“So you came to bother me instead. So nice to be your last choice,” Zayn says, and Louis laughs, eyes crinkling at the edges. Zayn’s stomach does something funny at that. It always has. 

Louis comes over and sits down next to Zayn, just like they used to, shoulders pressed close together, their heads stooping a little from the incline of the roof. Louis says, “It’s wicked to see you again,” and Zayn says, “Thanks?” 

And then Louis kisses him, just like that, lingering and sweet. Zayn says, “What the,” feeling dazed, and Louis says, “Shhh,” and kisses him again, down onto the bed covers.

 

SEVEN.

It goes like that for a few weeks. Louis comes in, grins at him, climbs on top of him and runs his hands down Zayn’s sides and kisses him and sucks his dick and pants into his mouth while Zayn gets him off. One night he rolls onto his front and says, “Maybe we could,” and Zayn says, “Oh,” and ends up fucking him for the first time, slow, slow, and then fast, reaching round to put his hand over Louis’s mouth so he’d stop making so much noise. “You’ll wake them up!” Zayn hisses, so far gone, Louis so tight and gorgeous and perfect, and Louis licks his hand and then bites it, which is pretty standard Louis. It’s horrible. He’s terrible. Zayn's never been happier.

All five of them crowd into the living room to watch films sometimes or Netflix, or University Challenge when they fancy feeling particularly thick because they never know any of the answers. One night as Jeremy Paxman stares furiously at a Cambridge PhD student for not knowing enough about early modern drama even though she studies physics, Louis sits next to Zayn, arm flung casually across his shoulders, and then he leans in to kiss his neck, his cheek, his jaw, hair feathery and soft against Zayn’s skin. 

Zayn says, “Get off,” and can't stop himself giggling. Louis smiles then, so warm it almost hurts, and catches his mouth with his own, soft for once. 

Liam says from the other sofa, “So that’s how it is, then?” sounding like a proud father as Harry and Niall beam across at them too, and Zayn feels himself flush. 

Next to him Louis laughs, all sharp teeth and sunshine, and says, “That’s exactly how it is,” and turns Zayn’s face towards his own with a gentle finger so he can kiss him again.

**Author's Note:**

> My tumblr is [flomps](http://flomps.tumblr.com) and my twitter is [foracorkscrew](https://twitter.com/foracorkscrew) \- say hi! Thanks for reading, let me know if you liked it. It was originally found [here](http://flomps.tumblr.com/post/125556505291/zouis-uni-au-please).


End file.
